Cedarville University School of Pharmacy

About

Cedarville University was founded in Southwest Ohio in 1887 and is known for its Baptist background, excellent academic programs, retention rates, and student satisfaction. Cedarville’s School of Pharmacy is focused on the needs of their patients and pursuing innovative and ethical ways of solving health problems.

Problem

The School of Pharmacy had already been using AllofE’s eCurriculum and eValuate custom learning plans to map where and how it was tracking the ACPE Appendices, School Goals, and student performance on course outcomes. However, the program reached out about ExamN because it wanted to come full circle and see if students were grasping the topics and outcomes they had set out to teach and achieve with eCurriculum and eValuate. To do this, the program wanted to automate its paper-based process with team-based, group testing for students.

Previously the School of Pharmacy would have students take an individual exam followed by taking it as a group with other students to reinforce learning of assessed topics. It also used scratch-off cards to calculate the teams’ scores and had to enter grades for each group member manually into a learning management system.

It wanted to gauge students’ attainment of the program’s desired outcomes and their progression of learning each topic, but the manual and time consuming process made this difficult to achieve. With its old system, the program was unable to securely lock down the testing environment. It did not have a way of giving students a limited amount of time to review their individual exam answers before taking the exam with their team. Being able to manage and organize assessment items of all types, such as multiple choice, open ended, and performance based questions was also something the School of Pharmacy needed.

Solution

AllofE worked closely with Becky Gryka, the Chair of Pharmaceutical Sciences, to define the goals and outcomes desired by the program. By working together, AllofE was able to provide the School of Pharmacy with a system that allowed them to work, teach, and test more efficiently.

AllofE built the program a new team testing module with reports that are only accessible through the secure lockdown browser. With this system the program instructors are able to give the students in-depth exam reviews to help them fully master the topics and outcomes they may have missed previously. It also allows the instructors to assign extra credit to correctly answered difficult questions, while not affecting the scores of those who answered incorrectly. ExamN assists the program in being more efficient in saving time by automatically grading multiple choice and short answer questions and providing detailed item analyses, reliability analyses, score correlations, and competency based reporting dashboards. The School of Pharmacy can give full and partial remediation based on each student’s performance with ExamN as well. By using AllofE’s system, the program is able to see performance on outcomes across courses and on ACPE topics from the beginning of the program until the end, giving them the ultimate student and patient satisfaction that they desired.